Language

A "language" is a lexicon of words that various characters use to speak to each other and communicate. In World of Warcraft, most races have a unique language they speak that only they can understand. Each faction shares a common language of the dominant race (Orcish for Horde and Common for Alliance). In previous Warcraft games, language was largely not an issue or why various parties could communicate or not and how was not explained.

A language may or may not have an associated alphabet for writing. Several languages may share the same alphabet, or may have a specific alphabet used only for that language.

The language a player's character speaks, for those with more than one, can be changed by going into the chat menu. Clicking on the "Chat Bubble" on the chat box tool bar, then highlighting "Language" with the cursor, will make a list of known languages to appear. From there, the player can click one to choose which language they prefer to speak.

It may be worth mentioning that when the language is changed, it only affects say, yell, guild, and party chat. General and whispers will be unaffected. Also, it tends to irritate a player's guild when they speak their "native" language.

As of Patch 2.0, it seems the scripting ability to speak other languages has been modified to check whether the character can normally speak that language.

As with many other features of the Warcraft setting, many of the languages[2] are likely derived from early fantasy or the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game — not in the sense of the actual languages, but in what kinds of languages are present in a given world. This connection is mostly obvious from the shared culture and parallels or outright duplication of language names, primarily on the outer reaches of Warcraft lore that appear in the Warcraft RPG — which started out as an offshoot of Dungeons and Dragons.

It should be noted that traditionally (in the RTS games and the pen & paper RPG) almost all intelligent races speak Common. The ability for player characters to learn additional languages was planned early in World of Warcraft but was not developed, likely due to the tendency of cross-faction communication to be insulting and profane. It seems unlikely that this functionality (learning additional languages) will ever be added. The Forsaken were originally able to speak Common and communicate with Alliance players, but this was removed with the introduction of Gutterspeak due to, once again, the tendency of cross-faction communication to be insulting and profane.